“I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!”

There is an alchemy of quiet malice by which women can concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles.

Words – so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

Though we speak nonsense, God will pick out the meaning of it.

My fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should entertain an idea of committing suicide, and, altogether beyond his hopes, meet with the good hap to be murdered.

What we need for our happiness is often close at hand, if we knew but how to seek for it.

The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.

Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections as leaves are to the life of a tree. If they are wholly restrained, love will die at the roots.

The marble keeps merely a cold and sad memory of a man who would else be forgotten. No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one.

The heart of true womanhood knows where its own sphere is, and never seeks to stray beyond it!

What a happy and holy fashion it is that those who love one another should rest on the same pillow.

Accuracy is twin brother to honesty, and inaccuracy to dishonesty.

Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.

Echo is the voice of a reflection in a mirror.

Death should take me while I am in the mood.

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these.

The agony of international relations is the need to try to practice politics without the basic conditions for political order.

In his (Christ’s) surrender on the cross all the pain and agony of mankind was concentrated at a single point, and passed through from death to immortality.

It is women who bear the race in bloody agony. Suffering is a kind of horror. Blood is a kind of horror. Women are born with horror in their very bloodstream. It is a biological thing.

To die in agony upon a cross Does not create a martyr; he must first Will his own execution.

I have written a raucous valentine to a poet’s dream and agony.

When you’re not involved, other people’s unhappiness seems to be about the funniest damn thing on earth because you think you can solve it, that you are God, that you are above this, and that their unhappiness is just such useless toil and agony. If it’s you, it ceases to be a comedy.

As to those who hoard gold and silver and spend it not in God’s path, give them, then, the tidings of a painful agony.

No, he was in agony, and he looked down at us – denying him, abandoning him, and betraying him – and in the greatest act of love in history, he STAYED. He said, “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.” He loved us, not because we were lovely to him, but to make us lovely.